Converting a PDF to an EPUB using InDesign

Thanks for the link; I will check it out.

I tried Calibri several months ago, and I was unimpressed by the way it ignored common word processor attributes like paragraph indents, italics, footnoting, etc.  Having worked for ten years as a senior architect designing database driven dynamic  browser-based software applications similar to those later produced successfully by Siebel Systems (now defunct), I an not interested in buggy software.  This is why I chose the Adobe solution.

I am using InDesign CS5.5 version 7.5.2.

Your answer is what I feared since I could not get at the objects within the PDF frame individually.

Following the conventions used for published books for the past 200 years, a PDF perfectly displays a book with fixed pages and page numbers with footnotes where they belong at the bottom of each page on a Nook, Kindle Fire or IPad.  This allows other authors to cite quoted passages appropriately, as they would in any paper book, by including the referenced page number within the constrictions of copyright law.  When the page number of a passage changes based on the height and width of the electronic device, there is no way to cite reproduced passages in the manner proscribed by convention and law.  Now if this is the way our culture chooses, then so be it.  But I fear software architects are making such decisions without considering the larger cultural issues they are affecting. 

I hoped that exporting the PDF to the EPUB, as fixed non-flow-able pages would reproduce the standard paper book conventions familiar to book readers.  In truth, the digital publishing community seems split between Amazon doing it their way and everyone else standardizing on the EPUB format.  Since paper books will never be able to duplicate the dynamic flowing formats of digital book solutions, it should be in the interest of the industry to conform to conventional paper publishing standards instead of warring over which new ideas provide a better way.  Having worked for thirty years on a half dozen different computer/digital systems, I know how quickly all the work created on an obsolete computer system can be lost forever.  But books printed hundreds of years ago can still be read today.  The "new" digital book formats of today will be replaced by "better' formats every four or five years ad infinitum into the future, if only because change equates to new sales.  But considering how we are probably only a decade away from the day when paper books become an anachronism, it should be in all our interest to try not to be hasty when it comes to changing conventions.

I apologize for getting into an epistemological discussion; but if we who create the technology of the future do not think about such things when we choose our methodologies, then no one else will either. In Design is an impressive software package.  So even if it will take a long time to use it to lay out so many pages, it will still produce the results I am after.